Jealousy and In the Labyrinth

Two novels by the pioneering French author and founder of the Nouveau Roman literary movement—with essays by Roland Barthes and others. In Jealousy, a man living on a banana plantation obsessively watches everything around him, from the landscape and insects to his wife's every move. In the Labyrinth follows a an increasingly desperate soldier as he carried a mysterious package through an unknown city. From these deceptively simple premises, Alain Robbe-Grillet produced two of the most effecting and important works of the avant-garde Nouveau Roman, or "New Novel." Jealousy was hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "a technical masterpiece, impeccably contrived," while leading French critic Maurice Nadeau wrote that " In the Labyrinth is better than an excellent novel: it is a great work of literature." In America the "Parade of Books" column proclaimed that "Robbe-Grillet will take his place in world literature as a successor of Balzac and Proust." This volume, which offers incisive essays on Robbe-Grillet by Professor Bruce Morrissette of the University of Chicago and by French critics Roland Barthes and Anne Minor, also contains a helpful bibliography of writings by and about the author.